When McDonald’s came under sustained criticism from campaigners in the 1980s, the company responded by constructing a carefully crafted image of corporate social responsibility. It insisted that it cared…

Just make your access open, and do away with the silly wrapper.
biblioteekjeDecember 9, 2014

Earlier this week the publisher Macmillan announced (in somewhat breathless prose) that subscribers to 49 of its Nature journals would be able to share links to the full text of articles that would otherwise…

What is it that sets academic publications apart from articles on The Conversation? Peer review might be your first answer. While The Conversation is built around a journalistic model, there is a big growth…

Imagine you’re a scientist. You’re interested in testing the hypothesis that playing violent video games makes people more likely to be violent in real life. This is a straightforward theory, but there…

It may not be to everyone’s taste, but open is the way of the future.
biblioteekjeMarch 28, 2013

Tectonic shifts are happening in the way scientific research is done. These changes, and the ways they may eventually affect us all, are chronicled in a new collection of articles commissioned by Nature…

While the Australian Research Council considers its policy on open-access publication and others within the scientific community call for the increased sharing of scientific data, the British are already…

Academic publishing firms have been all too keen to monopolise a crucial public good: academic knowledge.
giulia.forsytheMay 3, 2012

One of the great outrages of academia in the modern age is the privatisation of the profits accruing to publicly-financed knowledge. One form is that of academic journals, a primary method of disseminating…

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will help the UK government design a platform where all taxpayer-funded scholarly will be available for free.
AAP/Yonhap News AgencyMay 2, 2012

Most forms of publishing across the globe are in a state of flux. But university-based scholarly publishing faces a set of challenges all of its own. How can an industry whose target audience is so highly…

Some journal editors demand academics boost the number of references to other articles published in their journal.
Flickr/SpinstahFebruary 5, 2012

Over the Christmas period, a short Bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives. The Research Works Act aims to make it illegal to require researchers to make their work publicly available…

One in ten medical journal submissions are written by ghost authors.
AAPOctober 18, 2011

In 2009, medical editors from around the world gathered at a Peer Review Congress in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss, among other things, “ghost authorship” of medical research articles. Ghost authorship…

Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish.
Flickr/YakinodiSeptember 28, 2011

Scientists – myself included – are increasingly frustrated by the outmoded academic publishing system. The situation as it stands made sense in the pre-internet era, when one needed a printing press to…

Much of academic publishing has shifted online but that has created new costs, the publishers say.
Flickr/rosefirerisingAugust 10, 2011